Monday, January 7, 2008

Obama oratorio

One thing we've learned in the campaign so far is that Obama induces severe cases of jungle fever in homosexualists. First Andy Sullivan, now master prose stylist Ezra Klein, who ejaculated the following after experiencing an Obama “oration”:
I've been blessed to hear many great orations. I was in the audience when Howard Dean gave his famous address challenging the Democratic Party to rediscover courage and return to principle. I have heard Bill Clinton speak of a place called Hope, and listened to John Edwards bravely channel the populism that American politics so often suppresses. Some of those politicians mirrored my beliefs better than Obama does. Some of their speeches were more declarative and immediate in their passion.

But none achieve quite what Obama, at his best, creates.

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

In the days to come, just as in the days that have passed, I'll talk much more about Obama's policies...[more]
I'm sure he will.

4 comments:

  1. The normally reliable canine-and- nature blogger, Terrierman, also seems smitten by Obama.

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  2. This picture from Terrierman cracks me up:

    http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1359/485/1600/possumsailor11.jpg

    Does Obama own a dog or some other sort of pet? How come no one is talking about the candidates pets? I may have to look into it.

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  3. I wish there was a "Private Eye" type magazine in the States. If there is, I don't know of it. Those writers are probably having a field day, copying the permanently prone sycophancy of our appalling schlockmeisters. "Mr. Obama, your Excellency, would you agree that your presidential bid is the most momentous event in human history since the coming of Christ?"

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  4. "the permanently prone sycophancy of our appalling schlockmeisters"

    Well put. And they simultaneously praise and present themselves for supposedly being hard headed cynics, with all of the above wrapped in a thick coating of cliches.

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